Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Andrew D Rogers

Yadhu Nandh Gopalan

Mehmet Iyigun

Yevgeniy Bak

Sachin C Patel

Emily Nicole Wilson

James A Schwartz, Jr

Nicholas Stephen Judge

Kirsten Valery Stark

Neill Michael Clift

Scott Randall Shell

Loren Kohnfelder

Upender Sandadi

Sharath Viswanathan

Neil Laurence Coles

Matthew G Lyons

Angelo Renato Vals

Christopher Ross Jordan

Zoheb Vacheri

A method of avoiding unnecessary context switching in a multithreaded environment. A thread of execution of a process waiting on a lock protecting access to a shared resource may wait for the lock to be released by executing in a loop, or 'spin'. The waiting thread may continuously check, in a user mode of an operating system, an indicator of whether the lock has been released. After a certain time period, the thread may stop spinning and enter a kernel mode of the operating system. Subsequently, before going to sleep which entails costly context switching, the thread may perform an additional check of the indicator to determine whether the lock has been released. If this is the case, the thread returns to user mode and the unnecessary context switching is avoided.

Preventing unnecessary context switching by employing an indicator associated with a lock on a resource

Resume of a computing device from hibernation may be performed in multiple phases. Each phase may partially restore a state of the computing device to an operational state and may establish an environment in which another phase of the resume is performed. The hibernation information may be partitioned to store separately data to be used at each resume phase. The information may be stored in a compressed form. In a first phase, a boot-level resume loader may restore a portion of the operating system based on a portion of the hibernation information. The restored portion may be used in a second phase to retrieve hibernation information from another portion through the operating system (OS). Multiple processors supported by the OS may read and decompress the hibernation information that is then moved back to operational memory. The operating system may support asynchronous disk input/output or other functions that accelerate the resume process.

Multi-phase resume from hibernate

Various flash management techniques may be described. An apparatus may comprise a processor, a flash memory coupled to the processor, and a flash management module. The flash management module may be executed by the processor to receive a write request to write data to the flash memory, write a first control sector with a sequence number to the flash memory, and write the sequence number, an address for a logical sector, and data to at least one physical sector corresponding to the logical sector of the flash memory. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

Flash management techniques

This disclosure describes techniques of using a centralized rule database to control the abilities of software processes to perform actions with regard to resources provided by a computer. As described herein, each software process executing in a computer executes within a chamber and each resource provided by the computer is associated with a canonical name that uniquely identifies the resource. Furthermore, the computer stores a set of security rules in a centralized rule database. In addition, this disclosure describes techniques of enforcing the rules stored in the centralized rule database.

Centralized enforcement of name-based computer system security rules

Various flash management techniques may be described. An apparatus may comprise a processor, a flash memory coupled to the processor, and a flash management module. The flash management module may be executed by the processor to receive a write transaction request to write data to a flash memory, and write the data to a set of multiple discontiguous logical sectors corresponding to a set of physical sectors of the flash memory in a single atomic operation. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

Flash memory driver

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Andrew D Rogers